The Shape Shifter Page 5

  She had been, so she had told police, Shewnack’s girlfriend and soon to be his bride. But that would be after the robbery. Leading up to that she was the way Shewnack knew that Mr. Handy kept his accumulated sales collections in a backroom safe and made his deposits in a Gallup bank just once a month. So Shewnack had assigned Ellie her job in the robbery and told her that when it was over she should wait at a roadside turnout for him to pick her up and take her away to be married. She stayed there with her suitcase and waited until two Coconino County deputies came looking for her.

  “She seemed like a nice young woman,” Garcia said. “Not a real good looker, and too chunky for the taste of some, but nice eyes, nice smile.” He shook his head. “Not that she was doing much smiling when I was talking to her. She told me it had taken her a long time to believe that Shewnack was the one who had tipped off the cops about where to find her. And she still didn’t seem to really believe he’d done that to her.”

  “I guess it was quite a contrast to the honeymoon trip he’d had her expecting,” Leaphorn said.

  “How about that for a reason for some hatred?” Garcia asked. “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, they say.” He glanced at Leaphorn. “Scorned and betrayed. And she was out and about when Shewnack got burned up. She’d gone to prison, done her years, earned some time off for good behavior, and then got a quick parole.”

  “So she’s your suspect?” Leaphorn asked, and grinned. “I mean if the feds hadn’t taken over and ruled it was an accidental death.”

  “Well, maybe,” Garcia said. “Delonie was still in stir when it happened. Benny Begay was just out on parole, but Benny didn’t seem like a killer to me. Or to anyone else. The judge agreed. He gave him just five to seven and he got that shortened with nothing but good conduct reports. Besides, he hadn’t had much to do with the crime.”

  Begay, Garcia explained, had been sort of a stock boy, cleanup man, and gasoline pumper at Handy’s place. His role in the crime was disconnecting the telephone to delay the call for police help. Tomas Delonie was the outside man—assigned to be there, armed with pistol and shotgun to make sure no one came along and interrupted the action. After that, Shewnack had instructed him to collect Benny and drive them both down that unimproved road that leads from Chinli down through Beautiful Valley. There they waited on a trail down into Bis-E ah Wash for Shewnack, to come by and deliver their half of the loot. They did exactly what he’d told them to do. The story he told them to give to the police was that they hadn’t actually seen the robbery. They were to say they saw Shewnack drive away, suspected something bad had happened, tried to follow him in Delonie’s pickup, but had lost him. They were to wait by the road about three hours, then return to the store and report what happened to the police who, Shewnack explained to them, would surely be there by then.

  “Of course it didn’t work that way,” Garcia said. “Here’s the way it actually went. Shewnack drove up to Handy’s place in his pickup truck, walked in, pointed his pistol at Mr. Handy, and demanded all the cash. Handy started to argue. Shewnack shot him three times. Then Mrs. Handy came running in to see who was shooting, and Shewnack shot her twice. Ellie told me that she had started screaming then because Shewnack had promised her nobody would get hurt. So he hustled her into the back room, filled the sacks Ellie had kept there for him with money from the safe. The safe was standing open because Ellie had signaled him to come in just when Handy was starting his daily job of adding the day’s revenue to the stash.”

  “Signaled?” Leaphorn said. “How?”

  Garcia laughed. “Nothing very high tech. She went to the window and pulled down the blind. Just as Shewnack had instructed her. She said the plan was for Shewnack to tie up her and Handy, have Benny and Tomas take off pretending to chase him, then wait for him at a pickup place in the Bis-E ah Wash. He’d come there and they’d divide up the loot. He told her he’d have a bottle of chloroform to put Handy to sleep and he’d pretend to do the same with her. She was supposed to wait ten minutes after hearing him drive off and then reconnect the telephone and call the law.”

  Garcia shook his head, chuckled.

  “She told the highway patrol Shewnack had told her to sound totally hysterical. He even had her practice screaming and sobbing into the telephone.”

  “Sounds like he would have made a pretty efficient professional criminal,” Leaphorn said. “Guess he did. Didn’t the federals have him as a top suspect in a couple of other robberies after that?”

  “Yeah,” Garcia agreed. “A whole bunch of them. Jobs with a sort of similar MO. But maybe some other bad guys had heard about it and were copying the system. Anyway, Ellie said that practicing hysteria wasn’t necessary. Once she saw Shewnack shooting Handy, and then killing Mrs. Handy when the old lady came rushing in, the hysteria was genuine. Came naturally.”

  Leaphorn found himself feeling sympathy for Ellie.

  Before the long evening was over, Garcia continued, police had received another excited call, telling them that two suspicious-looking young men, one armed with a pistol, were parked down in Bis-E ah Wash. The caller said the two ran up to his truck when he drove down the track there, looked at him, and then waved him on. Who was he? Well, the call was from an old-fashioned shortwave radio; the caller said he was Horse Hauler Mike, and a word or two later the radio shorted out—as was usual those days. When the state police showed up at Tomas Delonie’s pickup in the wash, Delonie said no such truck driver, or anyone else, had come by since they got there. They insisted they knew nothing of the robbery, but since Shewnack had handed them one of the sacks Ellie had left with a little bit of the loot in it, that didn’t seem credible to the policemen.

  “I guess that does sort of establish a new level in ratting out your partners,” Leaphorn said. “I mean, setting it up before the crime happens so you don’t have to split the loot and arranging for the police to get them quick so they’re not chasing you. I’d say any of those three would have motive for burning Shewnack.”

  Garcia shook his head. “Of course only Ellie was free when Shewnack was cremated, but maybe the others could have arranged something. Communicated with friends on the outside. But how would they have known where to find Shewnack? You have any ideas to offer on that?”

  “Not offhand,” Leaphorn said. “I’d have to know their families. And their friends. But it sounds pretty near impossible to me.”

  “Yeah,” Garcia said. “I did a little casual asking around and got nothing. Well, anyway they’re all out now. Like I said, Ellie got part of her five-year sentence whacked off for good behavior. She was living at Gallup last I heard. Delonie got a twenty-five-year rap, and Begay’s was a lot shorter. But I’ve heard that Begay’s dead. When he got out, he got married and he and his wife lived up near Teec Nos Pos. Worked as a sheep shearer, handy man, so forth. Supposed to have learned a lot about working with tools and fixing things in the penitentiary, and for a while he worked for a sporting goods store in Farmington. Mostly from what I heard repairing outboard motors, sporting equipment, things like that. I remember the first time I saw him after he was paroled he was helping out at one of those booths at the Four Corners Monument parking place. Very cool about it. Said he’d had an enemy way cure. Got himself restored to harmony. He sounded like he was very much occupied with forgetting his old mistakes. And all those bad years.”

  “You say Begay’s dead now. How’d that happen?”

  “Shot himself,” Garcia said.

  “You mean suicide?”

  “No. Not Benny. I guess he wasn’t as good at fixing as he thought he was. He had taken some stuff home from the Fish and Hunt Shop over the weekend to repair it. Had himself a workbench in his garage, and when his wife got home from whatever she was doing, he was there on the floor. And one of those old German World War II pistols on the floor beside him. A Walther. The one they called the P-38. The magazine was out of it on the table, but the empty shell casing was still in the chamber.” Garcia looked at Leaphorn, shrugged
.

  “That’s how it can happen,” Leaphorn said. “Working with an unfamiliar weapon. You think you unloaded it and you didn’t. No sign of foul play?”

  “That was over here in New Mexico,” Garcia said. “Not my case, but I doubt it. Probably handled by the San Juan County sheriff. Wouldn’t be any reason to be suspicious. Who’d want to kill Benny Begay?”

  “Good question,” Leaphorn said. He found himself trying to visualize how Begay, a gunsmith then by practice, had managed to point that pistol at his head and pull the trigger. He’d extracted the magazine. What was he doing. Peering into the pistol barrel. That would make no sense.

  Garcia studied Leaphorn. “You know, you Navajos have a lot of damn fine ideas in your culture.”

  “Yes,” Leaphorn said. “And we have a lot of trouble these days sticking to them. Begay managed it, I guess. But how about Delonie. Was he that forgiving?”

  Garcia laughed “Delonie’s no Navajo. I think he is part Pottawatomie, or maybe it’s Seminole. He wasn’t quite like Ellie and Begay, who were clean as a whistle. Delonie had already accumulated himself a little rap sheet. He’d done a little time in the Oklahoma reformatory as a juvenile, and then got himself arrested as an adult for stealing cars out of parking lots. The cops who worked Handy’s case from the beginning told me Delonie might have been the reason it happened.”

  Leaphorn considered that, raised his eyebrows, provoking Garcia to explain what he meant.

  “You know how it sometimes works. A professional robbery type looking for a way to make some money asks around among the proper level of citizens for some locals who might have spotted a likely job, and so forth. He hears about Delonie. Checks with him. Delonie says Handy’s looks ripe for a robbery. Shewnack offers to buy in. Something like that. You know what I mean?”

  “Sure,” Leaphorn said. “I remember the double murder years ago on old Route 66 near the Laguna Reservation. At Budville. Bud Rice and someone else shot. Turned out a bandit type from Alabama or somewhere shopped around in Albuquerque for someone to rob, paid the locals a fee, they provided him a car, all the information, he did the job and got away.”

  “Killed himself in prison,” Garcia said.

  “But doing time for another crime,” Leaphorn said. “He decided to confess to the Budville murders before he died. But you’re saying the thinking was that Shewnack had contacted Delonie, offered to organize the crime for him?”

  “The thinking is Shewnack showed up in Albuquerque, hanging around in the bars where the hard guys do their socializing, let it be known he was ready for some action, heard about Delonie. Having a hard-guy reputation, so forth.”

  “Sounds reasonable,” Leaphorn said.

  “Anyway, whether or not robbing Handy’s was Delonie’s original idea, I don’t think he gets the blame for the way Shewnack set them all up. He told his parole officer that Ellie was his girlfriend. He was going to marry her, or so he thought, before Shewnack showed up and wooed her away from him and then wrecked her life. Apparently he talked about that a lot in prison. Anyway, his parole was passed over the first time because the board heard he’d been telling other cons he was going to hunt down the son of a bitch who’d ratted on him and kill him. He didn’t get out until early this year.”

  “How’s he doing since then?” Leaphorn asked.

  Garcia shrugged. “Okay, I guess. His parole officer told me he’s been checking in and behaving himself. Turns out Delonie was sort of like Begay in prison. Turned himself into a skilled laborer. Got to be an electrician, plumber, that sort of thing. Good with fixing things—from your refrigerator to your truck. He married a Navajo woman over near Torrejón, and I think he does maintenance and general handyman stuff over at the chapter house out there.”

  Leaphorn considered that. “Wonder how he managed that?”

  “What I heard, he’s married to a woman who’s involved with that Christian mission place out there, and she’s one of the people working at the chapter house. Keeps the records or something,” Garcia said. “I’ve heard some gossip that the marriage didn’t last long. But he didn’t have Delonie on his ‘watch out for trouble’ list.”

  Leaphorn sighed.

  Garcia chuckled. “You sound disappointed.”

  “Well, I’m just beginning to wonder what we think we’re looking for out here. Where we are now with what we know, all we could take to the district attorney’s office is a funny feeling. Not a hint of evidence about anything.” He laughed. “I guess we could tell him we just don’t feel right about that Shewnack death, and that fire either, and that maybe somebody stole an antique rug, and so forth, and if it was a murder, the one with the best motive would be Delonie. And then he reminds us that Delonie was in custody when Totter’s place burned and that he could call in a whole crowd of prison guards to back up his alibi, and about then the D.A. would recommend that we make an appointment to see a shrink.”

  Garcia laughed. “I’m beginning to think that might not be a bad idea.”

  “Well,” Leaphorn said, “I have to admit that all I have is that funny feeling I started with. The arson experts said there was no evidence of any kerosene or gasoline, or any of those fire spreaders arsonists use. Totter’s insurance company lawyers must have worked that over very thoroughly.”

  “You think so?”

  “Well, from what I’ve heard, Totter collected on a lot of valuable stuff burned with his store. So they would have done some looking.”

  “Which brings us back to that damned rug,” Garcia said. “Bork didn’t seem to think it burned after he saw that picture. So we have us a clever insurance fraud arson with Shewnack burned up by accident. Or maybe burned on purpose to provide the careless drunk starting it with a cigarette.”

  Garcia paused, waiting a Leaphorn reaction. Got none, and went on.

  “Or maybe Totter killed him for some reason or other, and needed to dispose of the body, and then added in a little insurance fraud as a by-product.”

  Leaphorn didn’t comment.

  “I’ll bet you’d already thought about that,” Garcia said.

  “Well, yes,” Leaphorn said. “And I admit I’d like to know more about the fire. But nobody’s likely to help us reopen that case. Just think about it. The FBI was just delighted to get Shewnack’s name off its list after all those years. They won’t be eager to prove they missed the fact somebody murdered him.”

  “And who’s around these days who cares?” Garcia asked.

  “There’s me,” Leaphorn said. “And then there’s the man who made that call to Mel Bork. That caller seemed to care. He didn’t want Mel messing with Shewnack’s old ashes.”

  Garcia nodded.

  “You have any idea who made that call?” Leaphorn said.

  “I wish I did. And I’ve got a puzzle you could solve for me. How did you get involved in this business? What’s your interest?”

  “I showed you Bork’s letter.”

  “I meant what got you into it in the first place.”

  “I wasn’t really into it,” Leaphorn said. “I was out here looking into a sort of funny burglary of an old woman’s hogan. She and her daughter weave baskets out of willow, or reeds, then waterproof them with sap from pinyon trees and sell them to tourists. Anyway, somebody drove up while the old lady was away, broke into the shed where they do their work, and stole about ten gallons of that sap. Captain Skeet—you remember him? I was a rookie then, and he sent me out to investigate and then had me drop that and go over to see what the federals were so excited about at Totter’s place.”

  “Day or so after the fire then?”

  “Yeah, when they went through all the victim’s stuff and found out he was Shewnack.”

  Garcia was looking thoughtful. “Who stole that pinyon sap?”

  Leaphorn laughed. “I guess you’d have to add that to your list of cold cases. The granddaughter said she saw a blue sedan roaring away. It looked to her like it might be almost new. Didn’t get a look at the driver and d
idn’t get a license number. She said there wasn’t a license plate on the bumper, but maybe one of those paper dealer’s permits was on the back window. Said it looked shiny new.”

  “What else was stolen?”

  “That was it, so they said. Just two big old lard buckets filled with pinyon sap.”

  Garcia shook his head, shrugged. “Maybe they needed the buckets.”

  “Or, let’s try this idea. Maybe Shewnack had taken that job with Totter intending to rob him. Sort of a repeat of the Handy affair. Let’s say Totter resisted, killed Shewnack, decided to dispose of the body, and he knew that pinyon sap would get things hot enough to turn Shewnack into ashes. How about that idea?”

  “Yes, indeed,” Garcia said. “And since everybody around here burns pinyon as firewood, it wouldn’t look suspicious to arson inspectors. Totter could get a profit out of it.”

  They drove in silence then until Garcia pointed to the slope ahead, to what was left of the old Totter’s Trading Post. The soot-blackened adobe walls still stood. The old grocery store was mostly intact, as was an adjoining stone structure that had been Totter’s residence. But its doors were missing and its window frames were also empty.

  “Scene of the crime,” Garcia said. “Except officially it wasn’t a crime. Just another fire caused by lighting up that last cigarette when you’re too drunk to know what you’re doing.”

  “Look’s like someone has done a little pilfering anyway,” Leaphorn said.

  Garcia laughed. “You could probably find those doors and window frames built into some sheep herder’s place,” he said. “But Totter sold the place after he collected his insurance loot. And the buyer never did anything with it. Don’t think you could get the D.A. to file any charges.”

  As they neared the junction of the eroded trail that had been the access road to Totter’s parking lot, Leaphorn noticed Garcia was slowing, and he saw why. That road seemed to have had some fairly recent traffic.